A Facebook status update

Facebook is a social-networking monster.

Home to more than 1 billion users as of March 2013 — the same population as Africa, the planet’s second-most-inhabited continent — Facebook is an indelible part of our daily lives.

It is not alone. Apps like Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat have been titans in the business for years, too.

However, it looks as if their era could be coming to an end. In April 2012, Facebook purchased Instagram for a cool $1 billion and, in the words of TechCrunch journalist Josh Constantine, “turned a budding rival into its standalone photo app.”

Though the offer was spurned, Facebook also pursued Snapchat for $3 billion in 2013. And the Wall Street Journal recently reported on its website that Facebook and Google are in talks with Twitter regarding a potential deal.

The frenzy to acquire startups and protect Facebook’s turf consumed another popular application Wednesday — WhatsApp.

With 450 million users, Mark Zuckerberg issued a statement revealing that he would pay at least $16 billion for WhatsApp, a number that raised eyebrows and questions about the overvaluing of Internet companies.

Clearly, these high-ticket deals are an indication that one cannot overvalue a form of networking and communication that has revolutionized modern virtual relationships. As a generation that has grown up in a digital world, it is likely most of us cannot imagine life without Facebook, not to mention the major apps it has acquired or sought.

Their irreplaceable status is exactly why Facebook’s mission to buy up the market and thus avoid competition scares me so much. It strikes me as exceedingly irresponsible — and more than a little Brave New World-esque — to have a single corporation as the sole owner of the entire online community.

The notion that Facebook is slowly buying up the Internet rather than competing in the global market by improving or reinventing itself is a troubling one, particularly because its CEOs have shown no indication that they plan to cease this high-cost, high-reward takeover.

Facebook’s enormous popularity has blown through typical corporate milestones and opened up literally limitless possibilities for future expansion, which would undoubtably benefit them but drastically narrow the field of choice for us. 

It’s hard to know what people can do. Compared to Facebook’s staggering cash on hand, it seems we have very little control over our apps’ slow landslide into Facebook’s grasp.

Let us not forget that it was us, the consumers, who bestowed Facebook with such fortune in the first place. With that should come a degree of influence that can be exerted to inform lobbyists, legislators and Facebook high-ups to show we disapprove of their manic manipulation.

In a nation where money is considered free speech, I am not condemning Facebook’s success, merely imploring our generation to be vigilant.

While checking notifications and sharing photos, don’t forget a status update on the corporate world. Our freedom depends on it.

­— sbkissel@indiana.edu

Follow columnist Sarah Kissel on Twitter @QueSarahSarah_.